The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [33]
“Seniority is a terrible way to determine who does what,” Wendy grumbles.
“Yeah, that’s what everybody says when they don’t have it.”
McKey has been with the same airline fifteen years now and has lineholder status, which means she usually knows her schedule a month in advance. Wendy is still a reserve, being plugged into the schedule where she fits. Maybe she’d be a better sport about working her way up if she weren’t also McKey’s age, possbily older. She looks older, that’s for sure. The airlines hire lots of over-forty attendants these days, women reentering the workforce as nests empty or husbands decamp. The airlines probably think that mothers and wives are well suited to waiting on a group of people who regress to childhood—and a surly, drunken childhood at that—the minute they board an airplane. McKey isn’t so sure. She’s neither wife nor mother, yet she is good at this, has been from the start.
Oh, she was briefly married in her twenties. But it was hard to count that as a marriage, even a starter marriage. They married out of inertia. Inertia and the desire to have a party. They were twenty-eight, long enough out of college and close enough to thirty to feel a little desperate about the numbing sameness of day-to-day life. In the back of McKey’s mind, she entertained the idea, even as she was planning the wedding, that it was better to marry before thirty and later divorce than to hit thirty without ever having been married.
But, mainly, she wanted a party, something to break up the tedium. The marriage worked for a while and then it didn’t, like a cheap car. They parted with relative ease, given that they didn’t own their house and their possessions had never really mingled. It was shocking to realize how few things they had acquired jointly. A mattress, some of the kitchen goods. If it hadn’t been for the wedding, complete with registry, there would have been almost nothing to split. They pretended generosity toward each other, when the fact was that neither one wanted to pack up all that shit. A waffle maker that made heart-shaped waffles. A George Foreman grill. A rice maker! A goddamn rice maker. McKey realized she had made a very human error, filling out those registries. She thought she was going to change, that in acquiring a rice maker and a waffle iron, she might become the kind of person who made rice and heart-shaped waffles. She knows herself better now, what she can do and what she can’t. She even likes herself. Perhaps more than she should, but she’s all she has.
Her mother used to warn her—indirectly, then directly—that life was hell for an attractive woman once she ceased to be attractive. McKey isn’t buying it. For one thing, she isn’t like her mother, relying on men to support her. Besides, her looks are holding up surprisingly well. Not smoking, keeping her weight constant, avoiding the sun—it all adds up. She looks good. Not good for her age. She plain looks good. Every male who boards her flight checks her out, a particular triumph in this polyester getup. Men will always look at her, she has decided, and it isn’t conceited to recognize this fact and even exploit it. Did anyone ever say that someone was conceited about money, another commodity to which some people were born?
And she is clear on this: her beauty is a commodity. She uses it to get what she wants or needs. She is not cruel with it, not anymore. She does not wield it like a weapon. She uses it. So what? Everyone uses what they have in this world.
Take Gwen. She isn’t as pretty as McKey, but she has this saucer-eyed, you’re-so-wonderful thing going on, which boys ate up sideways with a spoon when they were kids. To give her credit, she seemed to come by it naturally, and she didn’t use it only on boys. She cast those looks on her parents, on McKey when they first met, eventually on Sean, although never on Tim, not really, and definitely not on Go-Go. The youngest Halloran